3.

12
GRAMMAR & USAGE About the Author
Verb Voice Barack Obama (b. 1961) became the 44th president
Multiple verbs within a of the United States in 2009. As a senator from
sentence should have the same Illinois, Obama rose to national prominence after
voice: either active or passive. giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National
Active voice means the subject Convention. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii,
is doing the verb’s action: attended Occidental College and Columbia
The boy attended the University, and received a law degree from Harvard
fundraiser. Law School in 1991. He worked as a civil rights
Passive voice means the lawyer and a teacher prior to entering politics.
subject is acted upon:
The fundraiser was attended by
the boy. Speech
Inappropriate shifts can
confuse an audience. Think
about what effect Obama
Remarks by the President in a
creates by using active voice,
rather than passive voice, National Address to
in his speech.
America’s Schoolchildren
Wakefield High School, Arlington, Virginia, September 8, 2009
My Notes by President Barack Obama

1 … I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for
those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first
day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine
there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now with
just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are
probably wishing it were still summer and you could’ve stayed in bed just a

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little bit longer this morning.
2 I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived overseas. I lived
in Indonesia for a few years. And my mother, she didn’t have the money to
send me where all the American kids went to school, but she thought it was
important for me to keep up with an American education. So she decided to
teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday. But because she had to
go to work, the only time she could do it was at 4:30 in the morning.
3 Now, as you might imagine, I wasn’t too happy about getting up that
early. And a lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But
whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and
she’d say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”
4 So I know that some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But
I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m
here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected
of all of you in this new school year.
5 Now, I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked about
responsibility a lot. I’ve talked about teachers’ responsibility for inspiring

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students and pushing you to learn. I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility My Notes
for making sure you stay on track, and you get your homework done, and
don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with the Xbox. I’ve talked
a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, and
supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t
working, where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.
6 But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers,
the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world—and none of
if will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your
responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention
to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents, and grandparents and other
adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. That’s what I want to focus
on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.
7 I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself. Every single
one of you has something that you’re good at. Every single one of you has
something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what
that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.
8 Maybe you could be a great writer—maybe even good enough to write a
book or articles in a newspaper—that English class paper that’s assigned to you.
Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor—maybe even good enough to
come up with the next iPhone or the new medicine or vaccine—but you might
not know it until you do your project for your science class. Maybe you could
be a mayor or a senator or a Supreme Court justice—but you might not know
that until you join student government or the debate team.
9 And no matter what you want to do with your life, I guarantee that you’ll
need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police
officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.

military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those
careers. You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got
to train for it and work for it and learn for it.
10 And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What
you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this
country. The future of America depends on you. What you’re learning in school
today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges
in the future.
11 You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in
science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new
energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and
critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty
and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more
fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in
all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost
ingenuity: the skill of being able
our economy.
to solve problems

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3.12
My Notes

12 We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your
skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult
problems. If you don’t do that—if you quit on school—you’re not just quitting
on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.
13 Now, I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you
have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your
schoolwork.
14 I get it. I know what it’s like. My father left my family when I was
two years old, and I was raised by a single mom who had to work and who
struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us the things
that other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life.
There were times when I was lonely and I felt like I didn’t fit in.

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15 So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been on school, and I did
some things I’m not proud of, and I got in more trouble than I should have.
And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.
16 But I was—I was lucky. I got a lot of second chances, and I had the
opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams. My wife,
our First Lady Michelle Obama, she has a similar story. Neither of her parents
had gone to college, and they didn’t have a lot of money. But they worked hard,
and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.
17 Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have
adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone
in your family has lost their job and there’s not enough money to go around.
Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends
who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.
18 But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life—what you look
like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going
on at home—none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having

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a bad attitude in school. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or My Notes
cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No
one’s written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your
own destiny. You make your own future.
19 That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

20 Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak
English when she first started school. Neither of her parents had gone to
college. But she worked hard, earned good grades, and got a scholarship to
Brown University—is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her
way to becoming Dr. Jazmin Perez.
21 I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s
fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s had to endure all sorts of
treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him
much longer—hundreds of extra hours—to do his schoolwork. But he never
fell behind. He’s headed to college this fall.
22 And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois.
Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest
neighborhoods in the city, she managed to get a job at a local health care
center, start a program to keep young people out of gangs, and she’s on track to
graduate high school with honors and go on to college.
23 And Jazmin, Andoni, and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you.
They face challenges in their lives just like you do. In some cases they’ve got it a
lot worse off than many of you. But they refused to give up. They chose to take
responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves.
And I expect all of you to do the same.
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.

24 That’s why today I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for
your education—and do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be
something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class,
or spending some time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get
involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe
you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of
who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all young
people deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to
take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those
lines, by the way, I hope all of you are washing your hands a lot, and that you
stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from
getting the flu this fall and winter.
25 But whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to
really work at it.
26 I know that sometimes you get that sense from TV that you can be rich
and successful without any hard work—that your ticket to success is through
rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star. Chances are you’re not going to
be any of those things.

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3.12
My Notes 27 The truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject
that you study. You won’t click with every teacher that you have. Not every
homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this
minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
28 That’s okay. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones
who’ve had the most failures. J.K. Rowling’s—who wrote Harry Potter—her
first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published.
Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. He lost hundreds
of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I
have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed.”
29 These people succeeded because they understood that you can’t let your
failures define you—you have to let your failures teach you. You have to let
them show you what to do differently the next time. So if you get into trouble,
that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to act
right. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you are stupid, it just means you
need to spend more time studying.
30 No one’s born being good at all things. You become good at things
through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new
sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to
practice. The same principle applies to your schoolwork. You might have to
do a math problem a few times before you get it right. You might have to read
something a few times before you understand it. You definitely have to do a few
drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.
31 Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you
need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of
strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know
something, and that then allows you to learn something new. So find an adult

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that you trust—and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
32 And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and
you feel like other people have given up on you, don’t ever give up on yourself,
because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
33 The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough.
It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country
too much to do anything less than their best. It’s the story of students who
sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and they
founded this nation. Young people. Students who sat where you sit 75 years
ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil
rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years
ago who founded Google and Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we
communicate with each other.
34 So today, I want to ask all of you, what’s your contribution going to be?
What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What
will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of
you did for this country?

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35 Now, your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can My Notes
to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions.
I’m working hard to fix up your classroom and get you the books and the
equipment and the computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your
part, too. So I expect all of you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your
best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So
don’t let us down. Don’t let your family down or your country down. Most of
all, don’t let yourself down. Make us all proud.
36 Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless America.
Thank you.

Making Observations
• Which images and details in the speech stand out to you?
• What language stands out to you?
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Unit 3 • Compelling Evidence 371